Dale Loves Sophie to Death by Robb Forman Dew Page B

moved away from Enfield and was busy living her life all on her own.
    But not so many years—maybe three years—after that checker game, Dinah remembered quite distinctly lying awkwardly with Lawrence one summer evening, hidden by those same flowering bushes still thriving between their two houses. She had been only half undressed and very embarrassed at their mutual lack of grace. They kissed each other as best they could—she knew now that neither of them had understood a kiss—and she had just held on to him around the shoulders. But when he had moved his hands down her hips and along her thighs, and then brought them up to spread her legs a little and slip his finger gently inside her, she had forgotten all about herself and how she might be observed by him. The inside of her began to relax and tense all at once, and a shaky, liquid warmth spread over her as he pressed his hand up against her and inside her. Her arms had gone lax in their hold on his shoulders and fallen limply onto the leaves around them. But when he had withdrawn his hand to unzip his jeans and had suddenly come pounding into her it had hurt, and she came back to self-awareness with a shock. She only lay there stiffly with Lawrence between her legs, which were pressed flat against the grass—she had no notion of embracing his long back—and felt dismayed for them both. She had no idea what her response should be, and nothing occurred to her spontaneously. He had suddenly collapsed full length on top of her, and before she had revealed her own discomfiture, she realized that he was happy and pleased with himself. She lay absolutely quiet, because she didn’t know the etiquette that encompassed this, and then he started moving in and out of her again, with short, swift strokes—she lay still, but she longed to have his gentle hand play over her once more. Finally, he had rolled over next to her, with his arms and legs splayed out, exhausted. He had been smug, she thought, in a dreamy, heavy way. “You didn’t think I could do it twice, did you? I bet you didn’t think I could do it twice.”
    Dinah had been baffled, because she didn’t know what had been accomplished from his point of view. But she had smiled and risen on one elbow to lean over and hug him; she had been delighted to find out that she possessed a body he would care to fondle so urgently. For a few years her relationship with Lawrence had been like looking at herself in a mirror—he was the mirror—she adjusted herself to find the most flattering reflection.
    Now she wondered if she had been equally illuminating to him, but she thought not. She thought that while she was trying to find out what best pleased him—therefore what would best please
all
men—he was trying to find out what best pleased himself. In other ways, in ways of conversation, and wit, and how to have his hair cut, she may have been a mirror for him of sorts, but as soon as they were making love once more, he became entirely self-absorbed. They had been very young, and, too, it had never occurred to Dinah to find out what best pleased her. All of her adolescence had happened at a time when mothers said to daughters, or one girl said to another, with a condescending scorn at the very edges of their voices, “Oh, well,
men!
It doesn’t matter what you wear or what you say. They all have one thing on their minds, of course. Any one of them will undress you with their eyes even while you’re just walking down the street!” And Dinah had tried her best, but she had never been able to undress them with her eyes.
    But even with all this behind them, Dinah and Lawrence had each remained a person of the other’s childhood. They had been very young conspirators. Dinah thought that that was so as she looked across the table at Lawrence and noted that he was still a nice-looking man but that he could never have been as attractive as she had once thought he was. Nevertheless, as Dinah talked softly to Pam sitting so